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Citizen scientist: Out of the lab and onto the streets

With a bit of spare time, community labs and the power of the internet, anyone can do science on their own terms

By Kat Austen

“Mass participation could change what we understand about ourselves” (Image&colon; Yoshikazu Tsuno/AFP/Getty Images)

FOR most of human history, there were two reasons why people tinkered with the natural world&colon; to stay alive (or live better); or to satisfy their curiosity. From farming and building to dropping balls from towers and creating telescopes, these endeavours sowed the seeds for science as we now know it.

Over the centuries, science became institutionalised. At first, though, there was plenty of room for the unaffiliated amateur – the likes of Darwin or Einstein. But eventually, firm boundaries were established&colon; inside were professional scientists, outside were… who exactly? Amateurs. And over time those enthusiasts logging newts in muddy notebooks, scouring beaches for fossils, or mixing concoctions in their garden sheds, came to be seen as lone eccentrics.

But now there’s a revolution going on. All you need is a bit of spare time, and stable telecommunications. Millions of us have access to swathes of scientific information thanks to the internet, open-access publishing and servers dishing up drafts of scientific papers before they are formally published, with or without peer review.

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Factor in the web 2.0 ethos of self-organisation plus the power of the crowd, and you have all sorts of people in all sorts of places pursuing science as never before. This comes in many flavours – citizen scientists, DIY scientists, makers and hackers. And all of them are fascinated by science and they won’t be denied their place at the world’s intellectual feast.

One of the most obvious examples of citizen science is crowdsourced analysis. Take Galaxy Zoo. This was set up by astronomers in 2007 to help sift and categorise over a million astronomical images online. A few years ago, a Dutch teacher taking part discovered a new type of quasar, the Hanny’s Voorwerp. She became one of a handful of citizen scientists to be named alongside professional scientists on an academic paper detailing a scientific discovery.

Following a similar model, in October last year, Cancer Research UK invited the public to get involved in beating cancer on the CellSlider website – the product of a 48-hour hackathon. After a brief training, the participants spot and note the number and type of cancer cells present. They have already categorised millions of images from breast cancer patients. Each image passes in front of many eyes to ensure accuracy.

Aside from sorting raw data and turning it into useful information, mass participation can help us collect desperately needed big data from hard-to-reach places. Amazingly, the number of websites offering the chance to catalogue biodiversity is in the hundreds, from Big Garden Birdwatch run by the UK’s Royal Society for the Protection of Birds to monitoring tigers in India.

Mass participation could change what we understand about ourselves

And it’s getting more and more sophisticated. The Zoological Society of London’s iBats project, for example, now has an app that grabs bat sounds using your smartphone’s microphone, tags them to the location – and provides a species name. Then there are projects that allow indigenous people, such as pygmy tribes living in the Republic of the Congo, to map local biodiversity.

Sometimes the participants are also the guinea pigs. For example, a project for the BMW Guggenheim Lab, directed by cognitive psychologist Colin Ellard, sets out to collect physiological data from people as they wandered major world cities, starting in New York. It aims to discover emotional responses to different stimuli.

Getting people involved on a massive scale could really change our understanding of ourselves, says Steve Swithenby of the Open University’s OpenScience lab. Since most subjects in psychological tests are university students, he worries that the way we understand the brain may be skewed by a demographic which represents only a tiny part of the whole population. If we move to online testing, he expects we can involve thousands of people – a far more representative sample.

This is also the thinking behind The Great Brain Experiment, an app launched this March by the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging in London, that has “gamified” research. “Real” scientists capture swathes of facts and figures about memory, impulsivity, attention and decision-making, while you are having fun playing games. Not too surprisingly, the app has more than 32,450 users.

There are self-organised efforts, too, as individuals log details about their own health, which are then fastidiously collected into Quantified Self projects. Such projects can help highlight unforeseen trends. For example, the CureTogether website discovered that a subset of migraine sufferers were three times more likely to experience side effects when they took the migraine medication Imitrex.

Fab Labs

But it’s not about all big data or fun online. This kind of public involvement underlines how much science can benefit from recognising the value of inventive and interested enthusiasts. When you apply the self-organising and innovative hacker mentality to scientific research as well, something new appears&colon; the self-styled DIY scientist.

These are people doing science for themselves and on their own terms – in a local community lab, digital fabrication lab (aka fablab), garage, or on the bus. And while the lines between the practice of DIY scientists and citizen scientists are sometimes blurred, the result is science done outside university or lab walls.

A lot of the DIY science work takes place in hackerspaces and fablabs, with the help of makers – people who tinker with physical objects – or is indeed done by makers. Hackerspaces date back to the late 1980s and early 1990s, and were mostly based in Germany. The first recognisable hackerspace was C-base in Berlin, but the movement didn’t really take off until 2007, when it spread to the US. Now there are over 1100 and the model has diversified, as people from Baghdad to Birmingham gather to build everything from open-source scientific instruments for genome sequencing to satellites and parts for 3D printers.

Perhaps the largest group of DIY scientists are the biohackers – everyday folk who tinker with the stuff of life. This is DIYBio, and a lot of the activity centres round sequencing. In 2008, some New York teenagers pulled off a bit of a coup when they used DNA barcoding – a way of identifying species based on their specific genome – to discover that local sushi vendors were substituting cheap fish for the expensive varieties on their menus. Those techniques have been shared by hackerspaces worldwide. For example, after the recent horsemeat scandal, the Paris hackerspace La Paillasse held a workshop where founder Thomas Landrain taught people how to check the provenance of meat.

This latter project sparked controversy, opening up the old debates around genetic modification. The idea originated at BioCurious in Sunnyvale, California, but that hackerspace has since distanced itself from the project because those running it pledged to distribute the seeds to its crowdfunders.

This kind of controversy is a rarity, partly because DIYBio labs want to behave responsibly and avoid unwelcome attention so they are free to tinker. Regulations restrict how much the outside world is exposed to their genetic engineering, but as Raymond McCauley of BioCurious says&colon; “The field is largely free from top-down regulation because academic and commercial researchers have been so good at self-regulating. As biohackers, we want to hold that line.”

Biohackers want to behave responsibly to avoid unwelcome attention so they are free to tinker

How much real innovation is emerging from the science being done in these labs, though? Aside from the fertile ground of synthetic biology, there is a good deal of maker-style improvement on existing technologies. Take Tito Jankowski’s OpenPCR machine. A PCR machine amplifies copies of DNA. At under &dollar;600, the open-source OpenPCR machine is dirt cheap and opens up the possibility of home genomics. It has also proved popular with cash-strapped universities.

This is an ambitious plan by ordinary people outside the space industry. It exemplifies the complex relationships that are emerging between this fast-growing culture and larger institutions. It is a counterpart to the commercial bid for Mars colonisation that is Mars One. Rather controversially, though, SpaceGAMBIT has been fuelled by an injection of funds from the US government, as has the annual maker event, Maker Faire.

Just as the bottom-up DIY/maker culture seems to be succeeding, the fundamental hacker tenet of anarchic organisation and opposition to “the system” is being undermined. So says Mitch Altman, founder of one of the very first US hackerspaces, Noisebridge in San Francisco. “We do need money to do stuff, but if we’re accepting money from an organisation, how are we being antithetical to that organisation?” he asks. “The hacker community is getting so big and mainstream that the people who are paid to look at tech and trends will try to use it for the US military.”

But the increasing exchange between this new science and social and scientific institutions is not all one way. Dale Dougherty, the maker movement’s poster boy and founder of Make magazine, is optimistic about the potential for cross-pollination. Modern science tends to set higher store by theoretical research rather than experimental or applied research, he says. “I think what we’re seeing now has potential to transform the institutions themselves.”

If he is right, it could have huge implications for the scientific mindset. By re-injecting an enthusiasm for tinkering, the balance could shift away from theory and back towards experimentation. This, he says, could bring with it a new kind of innovation and excitement that can only boost both science and the world’s economies.

Re-injecting an enthusiasm for tinkering could shift the balance in modern science away from theory

Scientific institutions do seem to be starting to see the value in involving the public in research in new ways, with the OpenScience lab leading the way. “Citizen science has been projected as something special and different but what we’re trying to do is link citizen science into science enquiry, where people of different levels of scientific understanding can input into the endeavour by practice, enquiry and engagement,” says Swithenby.

This kind of talk will be familiar to readers of New Scientist‘s CultureLab pages, where we have often explored the potential of interdisciplinary collaborations. Bringing new perspectives to a discipline as fundamental to society as science has long been considered a way to promote creativity and innovation.

But this new science is also a symptom of an important cultural shift. Not only are people educated in and engaged by science, the scientific institutions are opened up to a more progressive way of operating – one that recognises the power and value of bringing “amateurs” on board. We have empirical proof that a crowd is more than the sum of its parts. Where we go from here is in our hands.

Genspace, the world’s first community biolab

My name is Ellen Jorgensen. After many years working as a molecular biologist in the biotech industry, I found myself wanting to make a bigger difference. I am passionate about science literacy, education and outreach, so in 2009 I co-founded Genspace, the world’s first community biotech lab.

Genspace is an open lab based in Brooklyn, New York, where anyone can get hands-on access to DNA technology – and take part in do-it-yourself biotech, or DIYBio for short. We support ourselves financially through classes and lab memberships.

Initially, we encountered some resistance – the media was full of Frankenstein-in-the-basement stories. However, once people saw what we were doing and the way we can fill gaps – such as the lack of professional space for start-ups and the dearth of labs taking interns – they realised our value to the community. It’s hard to be scared of genetic engineering when you’ve done it with your teenage daughter in our classes.

We also have a good working relationship with local FBI and Homeland Security personnel. They realise that an educated public is better placed to spot potentially abnormal biological activities.

The people who use Genspace are quite diverse, from professional scientists to lay people and artists, some of whom are doing very interesting, creative things. This ranges from bioremediation – using microorganisms to remove pollutants – to synthetic biology. You just can’t predict when or where a significant discovery or invention will be made, and we believe a broad mix of people with interdisciplinary knowledge is the best way to jump-start innovation.

DNA barcodes

My pet project is DNA-barcoding plants from Alaska to catalogue the species from this fragile environment. It is very empowering to work in a place where I don’t have to justify my work to a funding body – the only restriction is that the work adheres to standard biosafety guidelines.

Science is fun again when you are free to tinker. Who knows what cool inventions will come out of community labs as they spread around the world?

Tweet stuff

Here is what our readers said about their DIY science projects at #NSpeople

@JWoodnutt&colon; collecting wild mushrooms and catching the spores on agar plates to try to grow spawn from them!